Parallel blogging as an interactive pedagogical tool to enhance writing skills in EAP contexts

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Corso di Dottorato di ricerca

in Scienze del Linguaggio

ciclo XXIX

Tesi di Ricerca

Parallel blogging as an

interactive pedagogical

tool to enhance writing

skills in EAP contexts

SSD: L-LIN/02

Coordinatore del Dottorato Prof.ssa Alessandra Giorgi Supervisore

Prof.ssa Carmel Mary Coonan

Dottorando Viorica Condrat Matricola 956102

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to express my profound gratitude to my doctoral advisor, Professor Carmel Coonan, whose constant guidance and encouragement helped me to complete this study. I remain deeply grateful to Professor Coonan for helping me discover passion for research and encouraging me to persevere even when I felt discouraged and confused. I shall always remember the first recommendation given by my doctoral advisor, which was ‘Find your niche, Vicky’. These words marked my research and shaped my personality as an aspiring researcher. I thank professor Coonan for allowing me to find my own niche and for constantly offering valuable guidance.

I would also like to thank the professors from the department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies, in particular, the professors Paolo Balboni, Fabio Caon, and Graziano Serragiotto. Attending their seminars and classes helped me to discover the Venetian school of thought and gain new insights in the field of language education.

I wish to give special thanks to my fellow doctoral candidates with whom I shared so many pleasant and interesting moments. They have also contributed to my academic development by offering advice, but above all by constantly encouraging me not to give up.

I deeply appreciate the opportunity given to me by the WEBB programme, an Erasmus Mundus Action 2 project funded with the support of the European Commission. It provided the unique occasion to study and do research at Ca’Foscari University of Venice.

I also appreciate the support offered by the staff of Alecu Russo Balti State University where the research was conducted. In particular, I am grateful to the Department of English and Germanic Philology where I received great encouragement.

Last but not least I would like to thank my family and friends whose unconditional love and support have made all this possible. I will remain greatly indebted to them for their patience and faith in me. They supported my efforts and understood my wish to achieve the set goal. They all have contributed to its realization.

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INTRODUCTION

Both researchers and teachers in language education continuously search for the optimal way of enhancing the students’ learning process as well as boosting their motivation. Their interest is also to make the students become more responsible for their own learning. Thus, while aiming to develop the four basic skills, i.e. speaking, reading, listening, and writing, new tools and strategies are being considered in order to achieve the set pedagogical goals. The relatively recent interest in the use of advanced technology, both inside and outside the classroom, has proved to be worth considering while designing the instructional process.

The writing skill is a primary skill to be acquired by students in order to become fluent in their writing. It is a skill that can be acquired only after the previous three have been developed. Moreover, learning to produce coherent and cohesive texts in a foreign language becomes even more challenging for non-native speakers of that language. Hence the necessity for a conceptual framework that will help teachers to scaffold the students’ learning process and thus help them to develop their writing skills.

Being viewed as another form of communication (Widdowson, 1984; Nystrand, 1986; Grabe and Kaplan, 1998; Candlin and Hyland, 1999), writing is a paramount skill in academia, where it becomes a means via which knowledge and thoughts are communicated to the academic community.

Writing for academic purposes should be considered of utmost importance by higher institutions and be integrated in the curriculum. Throughout their cycle of study, students have to submit a substantial number of papers as part of the curriculum. Similarly, they are expected to take certain examinations in written, where again their fluency and accuracy are to be taken into consideration. Moreover, becoming fluent in writing is vital for the students’ academic growth who want to be recognised as members of a particular discourse community sharing the same background knowledge and conventions. Indeed the students’ ability to express fluently and accurately their thoughts and knowledge acknowledges the students’ affiliation to an academic community. Thus their success in communicating via the written text will depend on what conventional knowledge they share (Bhatia, 1999).

As academic writing has its own set of socio-linguistic norms and features, teachers need to search for the optimal context that will help the students to develop their writing skills (Celce-Murcia and Olshtain, 2000, DeLuca, 2002). Instead of deciding upon a single approach

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to teaching writing, teachers are advised to consider blending approaches (Nunan, 2005) that will help students to develop their academic writing skills.

With the advance of information and communication technology, it has become obvious that a reconceptualization of the teaching process is needed. Nowadays, educational technology is being integrated in the teaching process in order to help the teachers to achieve the set pedagogical goals. Educational technology has proved to enhance the acquisition of writing skills, making the instructional process more motivational.

The use of blogs can be viewed as a pedagogical tool that helps the students in their writing process. Blogging can offer the best context for the writing to take place in an academic related setting. Research conducted in the area has shown the positive outcomes of blogging when used for academic writing tasks (Fellner and Apple, 2006; Kavaliauskienė et all, 2006a, 2006b; Murray et all, 2007; Williams and Jacobs, 2004). Teachers need however to clearly envisage the possible outcomes of the use of blogs and determine in what way blogging can help the students to become more confident writers.

Nevertheless some researchers are reserved concerning the benefits of blogging in the students’ development of academic writing skills (Lin et all, 2013). In their opinion, blogging can little contribute to it. As research conducted in the field is not exhaustive, we believe that the issue of blogging used for academic writing tasks is worth investigating. Thus the primary purpose of our research is to determine whether the use of blogs can help the students to develop their academic writing skills in English.

The personal interest in determining the cause of the students’ poor quality writing prompted us to conduct the present action research. Relying on personal experience as well as on the feedback received from various colleagues, we believe that it is worth conducting a detailed field enquiry into the existing problem. Doing action research allows us to act and to decide upon what solution can help to solve the problem. In particular we will try to understand whether blogging can help in the development of students’ academic writing skills.

Our research has been conducted at Alecu Russo Balti State University of Moldova, where students are expected to produce quite a substantial number of written papers in English. It is the optimal context as the English language at the Faculty of Philology is used for academic purposes and it allows us to determine what hampers the students’ writing process in English. In addition, the students are technologically friendly, which facilitates the implementation of blogging in their learning process.

Thus, the study has two main foci, i.e. to discover the students’ perception of academic writing in general, on the one hand, and consider whether blogging can be used as a tool to

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enhance the students’ academic writing skills, on the other. We believe that by determining the cause of students’ poor quality writing for academic purposes it will become easier to decide upon what can be done in order to change this situation. We also believe that the use of blogs for academic writing tasks can help the students to become more fluent and accurate in their writing.

By triangulating the results from the gathered data it is possible to explore the relationship between blogging and the students’ development of academic writing skills. In particular, we shall analyse the students’ progress in writing, their behaviours, and their opinions related to both academic writing and blogging. We shall also look into the teachers’ perceptions of the students’ academic writing skills and determine whether they consider blogging as a solution that can help the students in their writing process. We believe that this research will contribute to our understanding of how writing in EAP contexts can be improved in the age of globalization.

The decision to consider blogging as a tool that may boost the students’ performance on written assignments is due to the possibilities blogging offer. It is believed that it can support effective learning and boost interactivity among students (Williams and Jacobs, 2004; Zhang, 2009; Sun, Chang, 2012). Thus students may all contribute to each other development of academic writing skills by sharing and constructing knowledge in parallel. They will be able to develop not only their writing skills, but also their critical thinking – a skill of primary importance in academic writing. In addition they will be able to form a small academic community where their interactions on an academic level will unfold.

As mentioned the study has two main foci. Therefore the present study aims to find the answers to two central questions:

Question 1 related to the first research focus: What is the students’ understanding of academic writing?

1.1: What are the most common struggles students encounter in the process of writing for academic purposes?

1.2: What is the impact of the World Wide Web on their writing for academic purposes? Question 2 related to the second research focus: Does blogging enhance academic writing skills?

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2.2: What strategies might the teacher apply in order to help the students to improve their academic writing skills?

2.3: What is the role of the teacher?

In order to find the answer to the set research questions, mixed-methods approach will be used. While dealing with the first focus of the research the data from the two background questionnaires will be analysed. Whereas, while dealing with the second focus of the research, data taken from several sources will be analysed (e.g. students’ posts, students’ pre-treatment interviews, students’ post-treatment surveys, and observation field notes). The main method of analysis is content analysis method, which allows to search for rich meanings and a deeper understanding of the topic, as well as to carry out some very basic quantitative procedures (Norton, 2009).

The structure of the research is as follows. The paper is divided in two main parts: (1) Literature review, and (2) The Study, each part consisting of four chapters.

This first part reviews literature in the field of academic writing and the use of blogs as a pedagogical tool. It consists of four chapters. The first chapter reviews the existing literature in the field of academic writing. It aims to reveal a model of academic writing as communicative language use. It is important to see in what way language is used to convey messages to a particular readership. That is why special attention is devoted to reader awareness development in students, who are supposed to realize that their text will be shaped by their potential readers’ expectations. As the paper is devoted to writing in EAP contexts, several models will be considered that might help the students to develop their writing skills optimally.

The second chapter will focus on the approaches to academic writing. In particular its aim is to try to understand what the ideal context for the enhancement of academic writing might be. As known, students are required not only to tell the knowledge but also to transform it. That is why, instructors should be aware of the approaches that might help them to achieve these pedagogical goals. They should consider the notion of contrastive rhetoric, which might help them to understand better in what way students could be assisted in avoiding the transposition of mother tongue patterns into the English language. Approaches focusing on the final product, the process of writing, and the socio-cultural context and function of the text will be presented further on.

The third chapter is an overview of the impact information and communication technology is having nowadays on the teaching / learning process. Main educational technology tools will

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be briefly introduced, as well as the benefits they might bring if they are judiciously integrated into the process. Special attention will be devoted to computer assisted language learning as a modern classroom is difficult to imagine without the use of computers. The interest is to see in what way educational technology can help to improve students’ writing skills in academic contexts.

In the fourth chapter of the first part, blogging and its relevance in EAP contexts will be dealt with. We will proceed first by defining what a blog is and what its features are. Afterwards, a brief review of the literature on blogging application to education will be presented. Then research results of the use of blogging in the writing classroom will be examined. Special attention will be devoted to ways of enhancing interactivity in academic settings as this might be a way of helping students to become more confident writers. The role of the instructor will also be delineated in this review.

The second part is devoted to the analysis of the results of the undertaken study. It also discusses the findings, offering recommendations and pointing to the limitations of the study. Like Part 1, Part 2 also consists of four chapters.

The fifth chapter outlines the quantitative and qualitative methodology employed for this study, beginning with an overview of the research paradigm and research approach. This is followed by pointing to the research problem and formulating the research questions. The research site and the study participants are overviewed next. This chapter also includes a detailed description of the blogging mechanism and presents the writing objectives and weekly assignments the students from the focus group are expected to do. We describe the procedures of data collection and analysis that will be employed next. Issues related to researcher’s role and validity of the research findings will be also discussed in the fifth chapter.

The sixth chapter of the study illustrates the findings related to the first focus of the research. In particular, it displays the results regarding the students’ perception of academic writing as well as the teachers’ perception of the way students acquire academic writing skills. It is believed that the findings will help us to determine the cause to the existing problem of the students’ poor quality academic writing. In order to answer the addressed questions, data gathered from the background questionnaires will be analysed. Similarly, we believe that the analysis of such local document as: the undergraduate degree programmes, curricula, and guidelines for writing research papers will offer significant insights as well.

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The seventh chapter is devoted to revealing the findings to the second focus of the research. In particular, the contents of the students’ blogs and their comments will be examined here. This analysis will help to determine whether blogging can enhance the students’ academic writing skills and create the sense of a small micro-community among them. The students’ profiles will be described in this chapter as well. It will allow us to better understand the impact the use of blogs has had on the students from the focus group. The analysis of the data will permit us to determine the students’ reactions towards the use of blogs, as well as the way their interactions on an academic level can unfold. It will also provide information related to the role the teacher has in the students’ process of developing academic writing skills.

The last chapter of the study discusses the findings analysed in the sixth and seventh chapters. This will allow us to conclude whether blogging can be used as a pedagogical tool to assist students in the development of their academic writing skills. We will try to determine the positive outcomes of the experiment. Yet, issues that appeared during the experiment will be addressed in this chapter as well. Recommendations will also be given in the eighth chapter. We will speak about the limitations of our study, and about possible implication for further research.

We believe that this study is significant as examining the use of blogs in the students’ development of academic writing skills will provide evidence of the usefulness of educational technology for teaching writing. It will help the teachers to consider a new context for academic writing to take place. It will also contribute to a better understanding of how to scaffold the students’ writing process for academic purposes in a foreign language. With the knowledge gained from this study, it will be possible for foreign language teachers, researchers, and curriculum planners to gain insight into how students use blogs for academic interaction and writing skills development.

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PART 1:

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Chapter 1 :

Academic Writing as Communication within a Specific Discourse

Community

This part is meant to show that academic writing should not be perceived as a non-reciprocal act of communication. Instead it should be considered as a communication act happening within a particular discourse community sharing the same background knowledge. Both the writer and the reader of an academic text virtually communicate with one another via the written text. The writer is aware of the reader’s presence in the production process, whereas the reader is aware of the writer’s presence in the reception process. They encode and respectively decode the intended message employing the specific conventions of the discourse community they are affiliated to.

In the subchapters below academic writing is considered as a reciprocal act of communication not necessarily involving the physical presence of its participants. Their interaction is shaped by the background knowledge they share, and by the expectations they have for each other.

The primary aim of this part is to draw a possible model of academic writing that will enable the aspiring academic writers to achieve their communicative goals. We will proceed from analysing writing as communication in general towards gradually narrowing down our focus on writing in English for academic purposes. It is essential to delineate the competence a proficient writer should develop in order to succeed in academic writing. We will describe the specificity of writing in English for academic contexts. In particular we will try to understand what needs to be done to help the students to acquire the necessary skills that will enable them to produce appropriate texts for the academic community they are affiliated to.

1.1. Writing as Communication

Writing, in general, is another form of human communication (Widdowson, 1984; Nystrand, 1986; Grabe and Kaplan, 1998; Candlin and Hyland, 1999; Celce-Murcia and Olshtain, 2000) involving a sender, i.e. the writer; a receiver, i.e. the reader; and a concrete

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socio-cultural context influencing the processes of encoding and, respectively, decoding the intended message. The participants are supposed to make use of the same linguistic code, whereas the channel is primarily visual. Like in most cases of human interaction, the participants should be familiar not only with the linguistic norms (language usage) but also with the socio-cultural conventions that govern this specific act of communication (language use). At the same time, it is a particular type of exchange due to the non-immediate physical presence of the interlocutor. This, however, does not imply that it is a non-reciprocal act of communication as the writer should develop reader awareness in the production process if he/she wants the message to be decoded appropriately; similarly, the reader should develop writer awareness in the reception process.

As seen, writing is an intricate process requiring the presence of certain abilities and skills that will help the writer translate the knowledge he/she wants to communicate into the final product which is the written discourse. Writing in a foreign language is even more challenging as the writer is expected to have a good mastery of the linguistic norms as well as of the socio-cultural factors that affect the act of communication in that particular language. Such a process implies ‘the incorporation of a range of cultural knowledge and experience in any individual response to a writing task’ (Candlin and Hyland, 1999: 11) in more or less conventionalised ways. It thus becomes essential to help foreign language students acquire this productive skill that will enable them to manipulate the given norms and conventions of the foreign language so that they interact appropriately through the visual medium and not lose their own voice. Indeed, ‘every act of writing is in a sense both personal and individual, it is also interactional and social, expressing a culturally recognised purpose, reflecting a particular kind of relationship and acknowledging an engagement in a given community’(Hyland, 2009b: 42).

Depending on the type of writing to be produced, the writer will approach the given task differently. He/she will engage virtually with the community to which the work is addressed and will try to meet the expectations of that particular readership. This will involve the use of different strategies in the process of writing. For example, an email to a close friend will follow the characteristic features of this particular type of personal writing. It will significantly differ from an email addressed to a professor where the linguistic and stylistic conventions of academic writing are to be enacted. Therefore the need for an operational model to be used by the writer/student arises.

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A model should provide the framework that will help to generate performance, i.e. will enable the student to write. William Grabe and Robert B. Kaplan (1998) argue for the necessity of establishing an ethnography of writing which will help to find an answer to the question of what writing is. It will also help to understand the features involved in the process. In the authors’ opinion, the first step in elaborating an ethnography of writing is to consider the classic model of narration based on the well-known ‘Wh’-questions. Thus, one should find the answer to the following: Who writes what to whom, for what purpose, why, when, where, and how? (Grabe and Kaplan, 1998: 203).

The first parameter of this model includes the person who is responding to a task in written form. It is an important element to be considered as the final product depends on who the writer is. Thus, a student whose level of proficiency in English is intermediate will produce a different text from the one written by a native speaker of English. Or, the writing of a student revealing the research results in a paper will differ from the article written by an acclaimed researcher in the same field.

The question of who the writer is highlights several aspects worth considering. On the one hand, we can note the importance of the person’s experience as a writer, i.e. a more experienced writer is expected to produce better works than a beginner. On the other, it implies that writing is influenced by the writer’s identity. This issue, however, raises some questions. When it comes to personal writing, such a perspective is accepted, even anticipated, due to the subjectivity of this type of writing. Yet, objectivity and impersonality are required in other types, as for example in academic writing. This does not imply that the writer’s individuality should be totally excluded. In this respect, Ken Hyland maintains that writers need to project themselves in order to sound credible and involve the reader in the decoding process; in his opinion ‘the use of stance1_{is an important aspect of professional academic discourse,}

conveying the field-specific expressive and interpersonal meanings which help readers to evaluate information and writers to gain acceptance for their work’ (Hyland, 1999: 120).

1_{‘Stance refers to the ways that writers project themselves into their texts to communicate their integrity,} credibility, involvement, and a relationship to their subject matter and their readers. It therefore expresses a writer’s socially define persona’ (Hyland, 1999: 101).

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We believe that in order to sound credible the author should project himself/herself in the discourse of the written text following the socio-cultural conventions of the community he/she is addressing. In this way, the writer will engage the reader in a type of virtual conversation where the realisation of his/her communicative goals will depend on the extent of the persuasive strategies applied in the text. These strategies should reveal his/her confidence in the evaluation and commitment of his/her statements.Roz Ivanic (1998, 1999) has researched the projection of self-hood in academic writing and has arrived at the conclusion that the writer’s identity2_{is projected in the written text and that it is shaped by the values and beliefs}

of specific discourse communities on the one hand, and by social relations and communicative purposes of the particular genres they are dealing with, on the other.

The next parameter of the narrative model tends to answer what the writing is about. It involves the content, genre and register of writing. The writer is expected to manipulate the norms and conventions characteristic of that specific genre and use the register that suits his/her needs best so that the content is clear and accurate. Indeed, every genre is made up of certain requirements to be followed by the writer. One cannot compose a research proposal in the same way as one takes notes during a lecture.

Every piece of writing is reader-oriented, and, as a consequence, one of the writer’s primary tasks is ‘to satisfy the reader’ (Thornton, 1980: 18). Consequently, writing becomes ‘a joint endeavour between writers and readers, co-constructed through the active understanding of rhetorical situations and the likely responses of readers’ (Hyland, 2009b: 31). Moreover, both the writer and the reader should approach the text with ‘mutual co-awareness’ of the other (Nystrand, 1986: 48), which will help to encode and, respectively, to decode the intended message correctly. And since the ‘reciprocity principle’ governs any act of communication, the process of writing becomes ‘a matter of elaborating text in accord with what the writer can reasonably assume that the reader knows and expects, and the process of reading is a matter of

2_{In Ivanic’s opinion there are three aspects of writer’s identity:}

1. The ‘autobiographical self’ is the ‘self’ which writers bring to an act of writing: their life-history, and sense of their roots. This ‘self’ is socially constructed by possibilities for self-hood which are available in the writer’s life history.

2. The ‘discoursal self’ is the ‘self’ which writers construct through linguistic and other resources in an act of writing. The possibilities for self-hood inscribed in the discourses and genres on which writers draw have the potential to be ascribed to them, once they draw on these discourses and genres.

3. I have also distinguished a third ‘self’ which overlaps with these two: the ‘self as author’. This self manifests itself in the degree of authoritativeness with which a writer writes. (Ivanic and Weldon, 1999: 169)

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predicting text in accord with what the reader assumes about the writer’s purpose’ (Nystrand, 1989: 75).

As seen, reader awareness significantly influences the discourse of the written text. William Grabe and Robert B. Kaplan (1998) speak of five parameters that will impact the writer’s choices:

1. the number of people who will read the text;

2. the degree of acquaintance with the potential reader(s); 3. the status of the reader(s);

4. the extent of shared background knowledge;

5. the extent of specific topical knowledge shared by the writer and the reader.

There are cases when one might not know exactly his/her audience, especially when texts are addressed to a plurality of readers. What the writer does, in this case, is to assume who the potential reader(s) might be and what discourse strategies he/she should apply to meet their expectations, ‘writers and readers think of each other, imagine each other’s purposes and strategies rightly or wrongly, and write or interpret the text in terms of these imaginations’ (Myers, 1999: 40).

Reader awareness is closely interrelated with the purpose of the writing since it can be considered as an attempt to communicate with the reader. The purpose will reduce the options a writer has while encoding his/her intention and thus ensure successful communication. One way to convey the intended message appropriately is to follow the Grician maxims of quality, quantity, relevance and manner. Thus, in order to avoid communication failures the writer should encode his/her intention in a factual, brief, relevant and clear manner. Although these maxims can be flouted, the writer assumes that the reader will interpret them as such. This is why the figures of speech are not decoded as lies but are understood instead as ‘deliberate floutings’ (Cook, 2000: 31) of the quality maxim. As a rule, the maxims are flouted to produce a specific effect on the reader or to signal out the writer’s attitude.

The writer’s purpose is also related to the theory of speech acts proposed by John L. Austin (1962) and later on developed by John Searl (1969). Since ‘all linguistic communication involves linguistic acts’ (Searl, 1969: 16) it is worth considering the study of speech acts as revealing the writer’s intention. Moreover, the virtual negotiation of meaning between the writer and the reader is done via the appropriate interpretation of the speech acts used in discourse.

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Furthermore, the purpose is encoded in the conventions expressing status, situation, power and attitude, revealing the sociolinguistic principles that govern the discourse of the written text. Consequently, ‘the participants orient their actions on certain standards which are taken for granted as rules of conduct by the social group to which they belong’ (Nystrand, 1986: 48). All these factors considered make the unity of the written discourse, they foreground the mental representations, i.e. schemata, ‘the conceptual frames that individuals use to organise their experience and get things done using language’ (Hyland, 2009: 31).

So far we have tried to define the concept of purpose in writing, and hence find the answer to the question what for the person writes in Grabe and Kaplan’s model. The researchers differentiate between the writer’s factual purpose previously discussed and ‘the concept of why people write’ (Grabe and Kaplan, 1998: 211). The former refers to the relatively overt intentions a writer has while responding to a task in writing, whereas the latter relates to the covert intentions or motives. Vijay K. Bhatia (2004) introduces the concept of ‘private intentions’ within the context of socially accepted communicative purposes of particular genres. We can speak in terms of socially recognized purposes, which are relatively transparent in character, and private purposes, which underlie the covert intentions.

Thus, the concept of ‘why’ people write deals with the writer’s indirect purposes not to communicate his/her ideas fully, which makes the decoding process more difficult for the reader(s). In this case one should examine the reasons that compel the writer to want to do so and how he/she intends to manipulate the reader to attend to the content.

Another parameter in the proposed ethnography of writing is related to the situation of communication, i.e. the physical context and time. The immediate environment is not as significant as it is in oral speech where success in communication depends on the context of ‘here and now’. The reader, in written communication, might not even be aware of the exact time and place where the written discourse was produced as he/she interacts with the final product and not with the writer himself/herself. Moreover, the place and time of decoding might influence his/her understanding of what has been written. That is why, in this particular case of communication, both the writer and the reader can always turn back to the text and reconsider their previous ideas about it. On the one hand, the writer might produce many drafts till he/she thinks he/she has succeeded in conveying his intentions appropriately; on the other, the reader has the possibility to reread the text as many times as he/she thinks necessary to decode those intentions. In some types of writing, however, the knowledge of the exact time

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and place is required for the decoding process, as for example, in the case of mails, so that the reader can make the appropriate inference in regard to the deictic expressions used in the text by the writer. It should also be noted here, that some generic constraints depend on the time and place of production, i.e. a 19th century letter will differ from one produced nowadays, or the linear way of writing in English might cause difficulty in understanding to a reader whose language is non-linear.

Finally, the last parameter in an ethnography of writing is attributed to the process of writing, and precisely to how it is done. As in the previous case, the channel via which the written discourse is communicated does not matter as much as it does in oral communication, though little research has been conducted in this particular area (Grabe and Kaplan, 1998: 213).

Yet, the matter of ‘how’ also involves the cognitive processes taking place in the mind that allow knowledge to be translated into writing. Scardamalia and Bereiter (1987) have claimed that the process involved in academic writing develops from a more general process of writing. In the authors’ opinion, not all students can master it. The two basic models involved in composition are knowledge telling and knowledge transforming3. The ability to transform knowledge derives from the ability to tell knowledge, and, as a result, we can distinguish between mature and immature composing. A student mastering the ability to produce mature composing is able not only to tell knowledge but also to transform it. In mature composing knowledge is brought into the writing process after the writer has identified the problem and has considered the possible solutions. Such a process implies an elaboration of pre-writing notes where the goals and sub-goals are set, whereas the writer’s primary focus is not on generating content but on considering goals, plans and problems.

Taking into account all these parameters, it is erroneous to consider writing as a non-reciprocal act of communication. The physical absence of the interlocutor does not imply the unidirectionality of the written discourse. Even if the writer might not be present in the process of reading, the receiver will give a certain feedback to the stated message, i.e. he/she might agree or disagree with it, or the very act of either continuing or refusing to read it also constitutes the receiver’s feedback. Moreover, the fact that the author might be later on quoted in another piece of writing proves the interactive character of written communication. There

3_{In the knowledge telling model, there is no need for the writer to monitor or plan coherence. Here coherence and} well-formedness do not depend on deliberate or conscious application of the world knowledge. The writer’s primary concern might be to find out what next thing to say, whereas coherence and well-formedness result from automatic processes. The knowledge transforming model retains the knowledge telling model as a subprocess, embedding it within a complex problem-solving process (Scardamalia and Bereiter, 1987).

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are cases when the feedback is given immediately, e.g. in emails or synchronous chat, which makes easier to trace the interaction between the participants involved in the act of communication.

Grabe and Kaplan suggest a framework of the ethnography of writing highlighting its communicative orientation. Their model illustrates the constraints governing the writing process that both the writer and the reader should be aware of if they want to succeed in their communication. They are supposed to co-construct the intended message during their interaction with the written text.

We believe that the responsibility for successful communication lies mostly with the writer, as it depends on his/her ability to appropriately encode the message. That is why it becomes essential for the writer to acquire the necessary skills that will help him/her not only to tell knowledge but also to transform it, and, thus, make the communication more meaningful, and, in this way, engage the reader in a virtual discussion.

Figure 1: Model of parameters involved in writing (Grabe and Kaplan, 1998: 215)

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1.3. Writing in English for Academic Purposes Contexts

English for Academic Purposes (hereafter EAP) has been at the centre of researchers’ attention for the last three decades (Silva, 1990; Hyland, 1999, 2002, 2006, 2009; Swales and Feak, 1994; Swales and Chang, 1999; Flowerdew and Peacock, 2001; Bailey, 2011; Bruce, 2011). The need for the emergence of EAP was partly due to the authors’ desire to get their works known to a larger area of competent readers, whereas, writing in one’s native language restricted the number of readers. As a result, English has become ‘the leading language for the dissemination of academic knowledge’(Hyland and Hamp-Lyons, 2002: 1).

Similarly, the number of students involved in an EAP environment has increased and writing has become ‘a key assessment tool, with students passing or failing courses according to the ways in which they respond to, and engage in, academic writing tasks’ (Lillis, 2001: 20). Hence, the necessity of helping them to develop competence in academic writing in English arises. This competence substantially differs from writing in their native language. Even if the study skills they have acquired in their mother tongue could be transferred into English making the necessary adjustments, there would still be differences in the matter of style.

Generally EAP is viewed as the teaching of language needed in an academic environment, which will enable the students to study and conduct research in English (Jordan, 1997; Flowerdew and Peacock, 2001). Thus, students are helped to acquire the communication skills needed for academic purposes. Hyland and Hamp-Lyons suggest a more exhaustive definition of EAP. They emphasize the discipline oriented focus of EAP as well as the differences existing in various academic cultural contexts which also should be considered:

English for Academic Purposes refers to language research and instruction that focuses on the specific communicative needs and practices of particular groups in academic contexts. It means grounding instruction in an understanding of the cognitive, social and linguistic demands of specific academic disciplines. This takes practitioners beyond preparing learners for study in English to developing new kinds of literacy: equipping students with the communicative skills to participate in particular academic and cultural contexts. (Hyland and Hamp-Lyons, 2002: 2)

It, therefore, becomes the teacher’s task to ‘equip’ the students with the necessary skills that will ensure their successful academic communication. The teacher is expected to provide proper and effective education so that students become academically literate, i.e. they become

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able to respond appropriately to the cognitive, social and linguistic demands of a particular academic discipline. Consequently, EAP concerns how to first tell and then transform knowledge via English taking into account the socio-cultural particularities of the specific academic discipline.

As EAP evolved directly from English for Specific Purposes, Strevens (1988) is frequently quoted when it comes to delineating the characteristics of EAP. In the researcher’s opinion, the teaching of EAP should be:

1. designed to meet specific needs of the learner; in this way, time would not be wasted; 2. related in its content to particular disciplines, occupations and activities, which will

enhance learner’s ability to be relevant;

3. centred on appropriate language in terms of lexis, syntax and discourse, which will enable the student to appropriately communicate within the academic community. Flowerdew and Peacock (2001) completed the list with other factors characteristic of EAP, which:

 are concerned with authentic texts;

 take a communicative, task-based approach;  involve custom-made materials;

 are aimed at adult learners;  consist of purposeful courses.

Todd (2003) suggests that the teaching of EAP should not exclude the approaches used in EFL in general. Yet, he distinguishes six approaches on which EAP places greater emphasis than in other types of teaching English. In addition to Flowerdew and Peacock’s use of authentic materials and tasks as a defining feature of EAP, the researcher claims that EAP also:  focuses on inductive learning and not on deductive teacher-centred approaches (the use of concordancing, or reading focused on text analysis, or students acting as researchers investigating academic communities – all this seems to favour the inductive learning);  applies process syllabuses involving task-based and project-based learning;

 promotes learner autonomy, which implies that the emphasis is on self-access learning, on the use of negotiated syllabuses, and on self and peer assessment and feedback;  integrates technology in teaching;

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 uses team teaching, where interdisciplinary contact between language and content specialists might lead to better results in EAP.

The approaches proposed aim at facilitating the process of the students’ gradual projection into a particular academic community. Community membership ‘offers a way of bringing writers, readers and texts together into a common rhetorical space, foregrounding the conceptual frames that individuals use to organize their experience and get things done using language’ (Hyland, 2009a: 47). The first step in becoming a member of a community is to identify its characteristic features, the frames with which it constructs knowledge, and the role of the EAP teacher is to assist the student in this process.

The concept of community implies sharing common interests, goals among members of a specific social group. Thus, affiliation to a community involves more than justsharing similar linguistic rules. Swales (1990) defines the characteristic features of a discourse community emphasizing the common public goals shared by its members who use specific mechanism to facilitate the process of intercommunication. These mechanisms are used primarily to provide information and feedback. The scholar also points to the fact that a discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, which implies the previous acquisition of some specific lexis. At the same time, a discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.

The concept of discourse is central to the study of human communication. As it is well known, discourse is language in use (Shiffrin, 1994; Cook, 2000; Widdowson, 2007), i.e. meaningful and unified stretches of language considered in a particular context. The contextualized language ceases to be abstract as it carries the concrete meaning intentionally encoded by the addresser which should be appropriately decoded by the addressee. As discourse is context-bound, Joan Cutting (2002: 3) points to the existence of three types of contexts:

1. the situational context, i.e. the immediate physical context that surrounds the people involved in communication;

2. the background knowledge context, i.e. the shared knowledge about the world the participants possess;

3. the co-textual context, i.e. the surface text formed of formal links, which the participants are aware of.

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As stated previously, the situational context appears not to impact significantly the process of written communication due to the fact that the participants belong, as a rule, to different physical environments. When it comes to the settings in the processes of encoding and, respectively, decoding, they might to a certain degree influence both processes. Yet, their importance is less substantial in the co-construction of the meaning of discourse as the participants have the opportunity to revise (re-write or re-read) the text several times before they realize their communicative goals.

The background knowledge context awareness seems to be of major relevance in the creation of appropriate discourses for a specific community. The writer should be familiar not only with the rhetorical constraints necessary for the formal encoding of the message (i.e. the co-textual context) but also with the mental representations shared by the members of the community. These representations, or schemata4, will help the author and the reader to co-construct the discourse of the written text as the information will be structured following a particular frame which is characteristic for that specific community.

It should be noted that the process of writing is based on the knowledge the author assumes the reader shares with him/her about other existent texts, which are related to their discipline. Thus, there is a continuum network of dialogical relations that participants of the written communication should be aware of. Dialogism is a term associated with Bakhtin’s work, who maintained that any specific utterance is a contribution to a continuing human dialogue - that is, it is both a response to past uses of the language and an occasion for future uses. The Russian theorist was the first to emphasize that human life itself is dialogic in its essence:

To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium (Bakhtin, 1999: 293).

Thus, discourses created to satisfy the needs of an academic community will be based on the knowledge of previous texts in this area, on the one hand, and will be directed towards future interpretations, on the other. They will enter ‘the dialogic fabric’ of the academic community who shares similar mental representations of the discourse specific knowledge. Otto Kruse states:

4_{Cook defines schemata as mental representations of typical situations, which are used in discourse processing to} predict the contents of the particular situation which the discourse describes. (Cook, 2000: 69)

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‘Academic texts can be understood only as part of a co-operative effort of a scientific community to gain knowledge. Each text refers to former knowledge and points towards the knowledge that will be produced in the future’ (Kruse, 2003: 24).

The shared background knowledge will help the author in the process of writing to predict the reader’s possible expectations. Therefore, the process of academic communication implies the activation of knowledge schemata highlighted by the topic of concrete discourses. This will allow the writer to be relevant, clear, brief, and true in his/her discourse, assuming that the reader will activate the corresponding schemata in the process of decoding.

1.4 Towards a Model of Academic Writing as Communicative Language Use

The production of the discourse of the written text implies more than language usage, it involves ‘complex mental processes’ (Wright, 1999: 86), as well as ‘three interlocking dimensions: (1) the written text in itself, (2) the social interaction which surrounds the production of the text and (3) the socio-cultural context within which this social interaction takes place’ (Ivanic, Weldon, 1999: 168), hence the need to train the student writers as ‘discourse analysts’ (Bruce, 2011: 124).

Recent studies in discourse analysis have provided valuable insights into the complexity of language use (Coulthard, 1985; Shiffrin; 1994; Cook, 2000; Cutting, 2002;Widdowson, 2007; Paltridge, 2008). The studies highlight the importance of communicative competence as enabling the participants ‘to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meanings interpersonally within specific context’ (Brown, 2000: 246). Thus, one of the major goals in EAP is to help the students to develop communicative competence.

The concept of competence was introduced by the structural linguist Noam Chomsky. Yet, he focused exclusively on ‘linguistic competence’ which implied that both the speaker and the listener have perfect linguistic knowledge ‘unaffected by cognitive and situational factors during actual linguistic performance’ (Rickheit and Strohner, 2008: 17). In generative grammar, the term “competence” is referred to as

the implicit system of rules that constitutes a person’s knowledge of a language. This includes a person’s ability to create and understand sentences, including sentences they have never heard before, knowledge of what are and what are not sentences of a particular

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language, and the ability to recognize ambiguous and deviant sentences (Richards & Schmidt, 2002: 93 – 94).

However, this idealized approach did not suit the real-life communicative situation where perfect grammar rules are flouted, whereas the speakers’ communication is still unified and meaningful. Larsen-Freeman points out: ‘communication is a process; knowledge of the forms of the language is insufficient’ (Larsen-Freeman, 2008: 128). Effective communication requires that the interlocutors agree both on the referential meaning of words and on the social, cultural and pragmatic import of values attached to the chosen words.

Later, the sociolinguist Hymes introduced the concept of communicative competence, referring to it as ‘social rules of language use’ (Paulston 1992: 37). It is an interpersonal construct that can be examined in real-life situations where two or more individuals are involved in the process of communication. The scholar pays special attention to the cultural factors affecting communication:

…the goal of a broad theory of communication can be said to be to show the ways in which the systematically possible, the feasible, and the appropriate are linked to produce and interpret actually occurring cultural behavior (Hymes, 1972: 286).

Such a perspective on human communication has made the researchers in second language teaching reconsider the previous pedagogical framework and shift towards a communicative approach in language education. Consequently, communicative competence was defined as consisting of at least four components (Canale and Swain, 1980; Michael Canale, 1983; Celce-Murcia, Dornyei, and Thurrell, 1995):

1. Grammatical or linguistic competence, which is close to Noam Chomsky’s definition of linguistic competence and which deals with the formal links used in the process of communication. It namely includes knowledge of lexical items and rules of morphology, syntax, semantics, and phonology.

2. Sociolinguistic competence, which consists of the social and cultural knowledge affecting the communication process. It enables the student to communicate appropriately, and thus make his/her intention clear.

3. Discourse competence, which implies the ability to combine language structures into different types of cohesive and coherent texts (e.g. formal letter, political speech, poetry, academic essay, cooking recipe).

4. Strategic competence, which involves the knowledge of both linguistic and exralinguistic communication strategies which enhance the efficiency of

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communication and, where necessary, enable the learner to overcome difficulties when communication breakdowns occur.

Thus, communicative competence involves not only grammatical accuracy but also extralinguistic, socio-cultural features. EAP students are expected to develop this competence, while the teacher should design a language teaching method ‘with a face toward communicative conduct and social life’ (Paulston 1992: 40).

Academic writing should thus be considered within the framework of the communicative approach, whereas, helping students to develop academic writing competence should become a priority.

Central to the language needs of EAP students is competence in academic writing, because of the importance placed on written assessments in academic courses at all levels. Competence in academic writing also relates to the future needs of graduates to communicate within professional or academic communities through written publications (Bruce, 2011: 118).

Discourse competence in academic writing should be viewed as being essential in the hierarchy of communicative competence. Ian Bruce argues that ‘discourse competence is more than textual competence, as it involves socially constructed knowledge, general rhetorical knowledge and linguistic knowledge; also, to intermesh these knowledge areas within discourse, it requires more abstract procedural or organisational knowledge’ (Bruce, 2011: 124).

Bhatia (2004) introduces the notion of discursive competence as a general concept which involves various levels of competence needed ‘in order to expertly operate within well-defined professional as well as general socio-cultural contexts’ (Bhatia, 2004: 144). In the researcher’s opinion, discursive competence should include:

 Textual competence, which implies the ability to use not only the linguistic code, but also the ability to use textual, contextual and pragmatic knowledge to produce and interpret contextually appropriate texts.

 Generic competence is seen as an important contributor to professional expertise, and is often embedded in specific disciplinary cultures. It means the ability to identify, construct, interpret and successfully exploit a specific repertoire of professional, disciplinary or workplace genres.

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 Social competence, which incorporates an ability to use language more widely to participate effectively in a variety of social and institutional contexts to give expression to one’s social identity, which is constrained by social structures and social processes. Vijay K. Bhatia argues that ‘success of any instance of communication, to a large extent, depends on the shared conventional knowledge of the genre to which the specific instance belongs’ (Bhatia, 1999: 37).Thus, generic categorization of the written text is crucial for its interpretation as it will display the regularities of discourse organisation. Thus, for example, ‘much of academic writing is an individual’s response to somewhat predictable rhetorical contexts, often meant to serve a given act of communicative purposes, for a specified readership’ (Bhatia, 1999: 22).

The predictability of academic writing results from the expectations the members of an academic community have. They are expected to share common background knowledge as to the micro and macro structure of discourse, on the one hand, and the socio-cultural conventions that will govern this particular act of communication, on the other.

Swales and Feak (1994) consider the below parameters involved in academic writing process.

As seen, the audience is to be considered first in academic writing, which, after all, appears to be an interaction taking place between the student writer and his/her audience. While writing the student ‘is responding to a demand’, and he/she ‘is literate enough to switch into the written mode to make that response’ (Thornton, 1980: 30). Thus, the writer needs to respond to a

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particular task that involves the production of a written text. Moreover, his/her needs should coincide with the needs of the reader. In such a way communication becomes possible and ‘results in stability and predictability of interpretation’ (Myers, 1999: 45). In academic writing, the student is expected to produce coherent and cohesive texts related, as a rule, to discipline specific areas (they might be assigned to write reports, essays, projects focusing on a particular subject). Swales and Feak suggest that ‘to be successful in your writing task, you need to have an understanding of your audience’s expectations and prior knowledge, because these will affect the content of your writing’ (Swales and Feak, 1994: 7).

We would like to emphasize that, generally, the audience the student considers before and while writing consists solely of the teacher. First, the student responds to a task in written form which has been assigned by the teacher. Second, it is on his/her expertise that the student is relying most of all. Thus, his/her primary goal is to satisfy this particular reader, who at the end has the authority to evaluate the paper. In our opinion, academic writing should involve a larger audience, including peer interaction. In this way, writing itself might be more motivational as it would not be regarded as a must but as a means of expressing and sharing one’s viewpoints in an academic context. Hyland considers that ‘audience is, in fact, rarely a concrete reality, particularly in academic and professional contexts, and must be seen as essentially representing a construction of the writer which may shift during the composing process’ (Hyland, 2009b: 32).

The purpose in academic writing should be clearly stated. One of the expectations the reader has is to understand from the very beginning what the discourse of the written text is dealing with. If the writer’s intentions are not clearly stated, communication will be a failure, and ‘stability and predictability of interpretation’ impossible. Moreover, in the academic environment where the student is expected to respond to a demand in writing, his/her purpose will mirror that demand in his/her writing. Thus, the purpose and the audience are closely interrelated, as the latter will impact the former. Generally speaking, the overall purpose of a student is to ‘display familiarity, expertise, and intelligence’ (Swales and Feak, 1994: 7) in the subject matter he/she is examining.

Baily (Baily, 2011: 3) distinguishes four most common reasons for academic writing:  to report on a piece of research the writer has conducted;

 to answer a question the writer has been given or chosen;